Patrick Dearen
Auteur de Starflight to Faroul
A propos de l'auteur
The author of numerous novels and works of nonfiction, Patrick Dearen was named a finalist for the Spur Award for the best western novel from the Western Writers of America. He has also published a series of children's novels set a on the Western frontier. Dearen received nine state and national afficher plus awards in six years as a reporter for two Texas newspapers. He lives in Midland. Texas. afficher moins
Séries
Œuvres de Patrick Dearen
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Date de naissance
- 1951-05-01
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- USA
- Lieu de naissance
- Sterling City, Texas, USA
- Lieux de résidence
- Midland, Texas, USA
- Études
- Sterling City High School
University of Texas, Austin - Professions
- author
Membres
Critiques
PATRICK DEAREN
The Big Drift: A Novel
FICTION
TCU Press, trade paper, 978-0-87565-570-3
192 pp., $22.95
2014
reviewed 3.8.2015 by Michelle Newby, Contributing Editor
The Big Drift by Patrick Dearen begins in the Middle Concho of west Texas during a blizzard in December 1884. Zeke Boles, a black cowhand and former slave, is running from a hangman’s noose when he stumbles across Will Brite, a white cowhand pinned under his horse and caught up in the barbed wire of a drift line. This unlikely pair, brought together by chance, learns that they have more in common than that which separates them and they must depend upon each other for their very lives as each seeks redemption for his part in the memories they are each trying to outrun.
Dearen has a talent for describing this rugged country and the behavior of herd animals. The stampede caused by the blizzard is vividly evoked: “Thundering and bawling, a great shadow that seemed composed of many smaller shadows rushed pell-mell…” Later in the spring when the cowboys of several ranches converge in the upper Chihuahuan desert to round up thousands of longhorns that have burst through the drift line, they discover the cattle “had planted their forefeet, and every bovine in their wake had plowed into the animal in front of it. Successive waves of beeves were falling in a swelling heap, forming a stair-stepping course of hide, hair, and horns for the beeves that charged after them.” Dearen’s plot is smartly imagined and masterfully paced, and the action sequences are truly suspenseful.
The author notes, “In writing about racial aspects of the 1880s, I have tried to balance historical accuracy with modern sensitivities.” He has largely succeeded in this and in an empathetic treatment of the lone female character in The Big Drift, a rarity in the Western genre. Dearen has created an eclectic cast of characters and even the minor parts are fully realized: black and white, city and frontier, educated and illiterate, rich and poor. There is a sprinkling of humor, usually when Arch, a buffalo skinner who frequently sounds like a professor, makes a pronouncement, “When a man’s romances have all been on a commercial basis…finding the ‘sweet Mary’ of his dreams will reduce him to a trembling puppy.”
How much penance is enough? Are there some sins for which you can never make amends? How exactly does the balance sheet tally? “Will lay pondering Zeke’s words for troubling seconds. ‘So we just playin’ our hands, that what we’re doin’? ‘Cause we went this a-way instead of that, can’t do nothing’ except ride right straight on to hell?’” I finished this tale with tears in my eyes. The Big Drift is not just another typical tale of the blood-soaked West. This novel is a satisfying and surprisingly smooth blend of traditional Old West, insightful modern psychology, thrilling action, a tortuous search for redemption, and the power of confession, forgiveness and what you had thought was the impossibility of salvation. Patrick Dearen is the author of more than twenty books, twelve of them novels. He is at the top of his powers in The Big Drift.… (plus d'informations)
The Big Drift: A Novel
FICTION
TCU Press, trade paper, 978-0-87565-570-3
192 pp., $22.95
2014
reviewed 3.8.2015 by Michelle Newby, Contributing Editor
The Big Drift by Patrick Dearen begins in the Middle Concho of west Texas during a blizzard in December 1884. Zeke Boles, a black cowhand and former slave, is running from a hangman’s noose when he stumbles across Will Brite, a white cowhand pinned under his horse and caught up in the barbed wire of a drift line. This unlikely pair, brought together by chance, learns that they have more in common than that which separates them and they must depend upon each other for their very lives as each seeks redemption for his part in the memories they are each trying to outrun.
Dearen has a talent for describing this rugged country and the behavior of herd animals. The stampede caused by the blizzard is vividly evoked: “Thundering and bawling, a great shadow that seemed composed of many smaller shadows rushed pell-mell…” Later in the spring when the cowboys of several ranches converge in the upper Chihuahuan desert to round up thousands of longhorns that have burst through the drift line, they discover the cattle “had planted their forefeet, and every bovine in their wake had plowed into the animal in front of it. Successive waves of beeves were falling in a swelling heap, forming a stair-stepping course of hide, hair, and horns for the beeves that charged after them.” Dearen’s plot is smartly imagined and masterfully paced, and the action sequences are truly suspenseful.
The author notes, “In writing about racial aspects of the 1880s, I have tried to balance historical accuracy with modern sensitivities.” He has largely succeeded in this and in an empathetic treatment of the lone female character in The Big Drift, a rarity in the Western genre. Dearen has created an eclectic cast of characters and even the minor parts are fully realized: black and white, city and frontier, educated and illiterate, rich and poor. There is a sprinkling of humor, usually when Arch, a buffalo skinner who frequently sounds like a professor, makes a pronouncement, “When a man’s romances have all been on a commercial basis…finding the ‘sweet Mary’ of his dreams will reduce him to a trembling puppy.”
How much penance is enough? Are there some sins for which you can never make amends? How exactly does the balance sheet tally? “Will lay pondering Zeke’s words for troubling seconds. ‘So we just playin’ our hands, that what we’re doin’? ‘Cause we went this a-way instead of that, can’t do nothing’ except ride right straight on to hell?’” I finished this tale with tears in my eyes. The Big Drift is not just another typical tale of the blood-soaked West. This novel is a satisfying and surprisingly smooth blend of traditional Old West, insightful modern psychology, thrilling action, a tortuous search for redemption, and the power of confession, forgiveness and what you had thought was the impossibility of salvation. Patrick Dearen is the author of more than twenty books, twelve of them novels. He is at the top of his powers in The Big Drift.… (plus d'informations)
1 
TexasBookLover | Mar 8, 2015 |
TexasBookLover | Mar 8, 2015 | 
A pleasant enough sotry of extreme passions. I hope the reader likes metaphors because this writers issued them out as razindrops n a hurricane. Protagonist Alan Burke is recued by his spiritual son from a mine after nine years of hell. He finds true love (hee) with a prostitute in a bordello and together, they go through several adventures, both trhying to get to Faroul, the center of being where time, space, and the spiritual Om reside and where they can become as Gods.
Prix et récompenses
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Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 24
- Membres
- 188
- Popularité
- #115,783
- Évaluation
- 3.7
- Critiques
- 3
- ISBN
- 67
Patrick Dearen
Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River
University of Oklahoma Press
Hardcover 978-0-8061-5201-1 (also available as an ebook), 256 pgs., $29.95
March 2016
WINNER, 2016 NEW MEXICO-ARIZONA BOOK AWARD
The headwaters of the Pecos originate 13,000 feet up in the Sangre de Christo Mountains of New Mexico. “Fed by snowmelt, springs, and monsoon rains,” writes author Patrick Dearen, “the Pecos plunges over dramatic Pecos Falls within its first four miles and tumbles on down out of the Sangre de Cristos’ elongated horseshoe of thrusting peaks and massive ridges.” The Pecos proceeds on its way to the Amistad Reservoir where it mingles with other tributaries on their way to the Gulf of Mexico.
The first historical record we have of the character of the Pecos River is from a Spanish expedition in 1583. Antonio de Espejo christened the stream El Salado (salty). By 1942 the National Resources Planning Board declared that “[f]or its size the basin of the Pecos River probably presents a greater aggregation of problems … than any other irrigated basin in the Western U.S.” The challenges include, but are not limited to, decreasing flow, recurring droughts, salinity, sedimentation, golden algae, low oxygen levels, the needs of endangered species, recreational overuse and abuse, and thickening of watershed brush (imported salt cedars).
The Pecos River Resolution Corporation (PRRC), incorporated in 2007, is a nonprofit “dedicated … to documenting the Pecos River of the past and present … [and] exploring remedies for its ills and its potential for the future.” Bitter Waters: The Struggles of the Pecos River is the first stage of this project and also represents Midland resident Patrick Dearen’s more than thirty years of personal exploration of the river.
Dearen brings his novelist’s skills to natural ecology, and he does an excellent job of relating the inter-relatedness of things. As a result, Bitter Waters is more literary than expected. Dearen’s prodigious research provides a wealth of well-organized facts and figures snugly wrapped in narrative. Carefully chosen photographs, many from Dearen’s personal collection, enhance the text.
One of the most basic considerations when attempting to “restore” the Pecos is determining a baseline target. Is it 1583, 1961, or sometime in between?
The Spanish began irrigation farming in 1794; dams, reservoirs, and canals appeared in the late nineteenth century; drilling of wells began in 1911. As early as 1891, the issue of flow in such salty water was identified. Waste from mining enterprises was dumped directly into the Pecos. The federal government did their part by mismanaging protection of the headwaters and watershed with policies that suppressed wildfires and allowed overgrazing. Project Gnome, an initiative of the Atomic Energy Commission, detonated a nuclear bomb underground, over an aquifer that ultimately emptied into the Pecos at Malaga Bend, in 1961. The amount of salt carried downstream, threatening the Amistad “reservoir’s future as a municipal water supply for two nations,” became an international issue in 1964. Climate change spurs the northward spread of the Sonora and Chihuahua Deserts. Texas and New Mexico have fought in legislatures and courts for decades over apportionment of the life-giving Pecos.
The future of “an enormous expanse—from northern New Mexico to the mouth of the Pecos and on down the Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico” is at stake. Whether or not the Pecos River can be saved remains an open question.
Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life.… (plus d'informations)